Given that I earn a living as a journalist, you can call me a professional observer. A set of properly working eyeballs attends this occupation, and mine requires eyeglasses for optimal performance. Often I use my eyeballs and eyeglasses to watch television. It so happens that I recently purchased a new pair of glasses and a new flat-screen television on the same day. And you know what I observed? The eyeglasses with bifocal lenses, at about $1,000, were more ...

To walk down a street in Midland, Mich., this summer is to witness a scene of mass carnage: row upon row of tree stumps with just a scattering of sawdust around them. This trail of destruction is the work not of tornadoes or of man but of a voracious beetle known as the emerald ash borer, first found in the U.S. in Detroit in 2002. The spreading infestation has killed some 60 million ash trees in 15 states stretching east ...

On writing the book I've always been given to remembrance and remembering--more when I was younger even than when I was President. When I was a young man, I thought about my childhood all the time. It's a Southern thing; we're all obsessed with the past. I was very blessed that both my mother and I saved virtually everything from my childhood. I was always a pack rat. I never had writer's block once I started. But I did ...

Suddenly, it's 1979, when Steven Spielberg was the kid with the magic touch, and science fiction movies invested their alien encounters with emotional uplift. Super 8, the J.J. Abrams creature feature set in that more innocent time and produced by Spielberg — and directly inspired by the young master's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — finished first at the North American box office with a $37 million opening weekend, according to early ...

It was one of the stranger news stories in a long time — and one of the most polarizing. Firefighters in rural Tennessee looked on as a house burned because the family who lived in it had not paid the $75 annual fire-protection fee. Their home was destroyed — along with three puppies that were inside.What is more striking than the story itself is the debate it has set off, which has been raging now ...

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote about many scary things: the firebombing of Dresden, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the specter of individuals controlled by the state or by technology. But the most unnerving image he ever put on paper may have been this, written when he was 47 years old, recounting the words of a fellow Indianapolis high school grad: "When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people ...

To find the happy teacher lately became the scientific quest of Assistant Director Robert Hoppock of National Occupational Conference. He asked groups of teachers if they were happy in their work, why or why not. One-fourth of the unhappy teachers had been so from youth when they had wanted to run away from home. Thirty per cent of them felt that their jobs made them do things that hurt their consciences, and 40% thought there was too much politics in ...

Since bones deteriorate with age, it makes sense to take in more calcium as we get older to lower the risk of fractures. But how much is enough? The latest report from Swedish researchers suggests that for postmenopausal women, anywhere from about 700 to 900 mg of calcium a day is ideal for preventing bone fractures. Higher levels than that had no additional impact on fracture risk. The scientists studied more than 60,000 women who reported their dietary and supplemental ...

These are not the people you expect to come to the rescue. Rock stars are designed to be shiny, shallow creatures, furloughed from reality for all time. Billionaires are even more removed, nestled atop fantastic wealth where they never again have to place their own calls or defrost dinner or fly commercial. So Bono spends several thousand dollars at a restaurant for a nice Pinot Noir, and Bill Gates, the great predator of the Internet age, has a trampoline room ...

Like most people who are me, I long to be a worldwide icon. Unfortunately, my copy of The Worldwide Icon How-to Guide was published in 1950, when you could get famous writing a column in TIME magazine. Now there are easier options for becoming famous — auditioning for American Idol, videotaping surprised cats, being a housewife who is real. But even those take some effort. Then I found out that, after a public relations disaster with its spokesduck, the multinational ...